Yep, any ethics that doesn't involve reflexivity and rigorous questioning is likely to go off the rails.

OK, that's really interesting! How often, and which orcas?

I'm saying

"Pay attention to trends. What you state as impossible is happening incrementally despite the protests of theory."

cf. xeno's paradox; theories limited by excessive parameters will fail.

Also: maybe the universality doesn't need to be as totalizing as you assume for a global ethics platform to succeed. We aren't talking about total consensus; as hominids we are wired to have some kind of minority opposition to keep evolving. In practical terms a consensus can be 'good enough'--how you decide where to draw the lines is an interesting but necessarily drawn out discussion.

I am pretty sure this is an excellent example of "perfect is the enemy of good".

Sometimes you just have to get shit done and compromises are necessary. Again, alignment is not necessarily about lining things up perfectly.

You might be weighting unevenly important ethical questions as falsely equivalent.

Sure, the trolly problem is a great way to emphasize a certain framework, but it's an outlier in practice, as it's useful for certain designs like safety devices or predictive measures.

However the baseline of behaviour regulation around basic legal frameworks is perhaps less sensitive to these variables and more easily fit into a roughly acceptable set of global standards and norms.

An example might be child sexual abuse proscriptions. It doesn't really matter much if your culture is authoritarian about family relations, that's a line we can likely agree should never be crossed.

And yet, some laws are trending toward universal without enforcement by a monopoly on violence. There's a global alignment under way, which is hopeful considering that we are struggling with planning alignment strategies for impending AGI.

For instance, the elimination of slavery proceeds, with a few holdouts like prison systems and regressive states. Incest rules and age of consent rules are becoming more standard. Fraud rules and awareness of conflicts of interest are becoming increasingly prevalent.

These are arguably the international effects of humanism riding the coattails of trade, and wars being won by democratic governments, but there's also a zeitgeist related to the growth of universal education, I think.

Orcas are fussy eaters: the Salish sea resident J pod, for instance, only really eat salmon, and the genetically nearly identical, but culturally quite different transient pods, are particular about eating seals and sea lions and whales and things with lots of fat on them.

Chances are the transients would ping this feline and realize it's nothing but sinew and bones with almost no fat and not worth eating.

Demiurge 2.0, on all platforms. Pre-order now!

Amateur time in the Ux Department... who does that, switch controls to their opposite function when eyesight is at its worst?!

I have chatGPT in my frickin' pocket most of the day. It's amazing but mostly just a testbot still so here I am, kind of meh, even though it was not on my radar for at least a few years, or so I thought a few months ago.

Faster than expected. And yet life carries on much as before, with a little sorcerer's apprentice nearby if I want to bother. What a time!

Updoot for mentioning nixOS, which I am still holding out hope for getting a user-friendly-enough package manager.

Automation is a two-edged sword. It puts management level decisions into every day life where they didn't exist before.

An example I use a few times a week is talking to boomers about how computers are not the automation appliances they had hoped for yet. They still have to figure out how to do many of the things the automation is not fully capable of.

For example, if you are over 45 or so, you probably remember being a young person and looking at white-collar jobs listed like filing clerk level one or three.

Those jobs practically don't exist anymore. Everyone does their own filing, and the filing cabinet is a hard drive that they carry around with them or are primarily responsible for. In a large corporation, you might have a sysadmin who is doing some of the filing cabinet maintenance, but you still have to file your own shit.

If you told someone in 1970, that one of the unacknowledged but dominant effects of computers in 2020 would be that more people have to learn to become filing clerks, they would've looked at you funny.

AI fully integrated will be similarly replacing jobs and throwing unexpected responsibilities on us.

Probably get around to finally finishing Finnegan's Wake.

Oh, and, learn to dance.

It's (somewhat glibly) called, at various times, a kleptocracy, a plutocracy, or an oligarchy.

Anyway, a kleptocracy is "a government whose corrupt leaders (kleptocrats) use political power to expropriate the wealth of the people and land they govern, typically by embezzling or misappropriating government funds at the expense of the wider population."

So, it depends on who you believe: Rupert Murdoch (Fox), CNN, PBS, or the likes of Chomsky.

Reasoned and studied opinions seem to lean towards plutocracy.

If cause and effect are as linear as they appear, maybe. Possibly your future self has more influence on present you than you can perceive.

Or you could think of it like strategies versus tactics: you make a narrative to construct consciousness out of your memories, and while decisions in the moment are happening before you know, you can affect the mid-and-long range decisions before they occur.

I took a quick look at the comment history of the person you are accusing of racism, and nothing obvious showed up. Either excoriate someone properly with arguments and evidence or sit down, but shame on you for false accusations.

If you are trying to make a weak joke, then shame on you in 3 other ways.

Also: spelling, ffs.

Reliable housing and self determination are more important than my car being a transformer.

Imagine that. The true singularity is expressed in social effects.